A Study Of The Effects Of Output Task Types On Noticing And Incidental Acquisition Of Academic English Formulaic Sequences

In recent years,college English curriculum for undergraduates with a higher level of English proficiency in China has been going through the transition from English for General Purposes(EGP)to English for Academic Purposes(EAP).It is necessary and significant for college students to acquire Academic English for their better and further study.The ubiquity and significance of formulaic sequences(FS)in academic writing have been revealed by many corpus studies.Thus,acquiring academic FS is essential for college students.However,most previous studies on output task types in second language acquisition focus on grammatical forms or notional words and there is less research on what kind of output task can promote acquisition of academic FS for EFL learners.Compared with notional words and grammatical forms,FS are less salient(Wray,2002;Bishop,2004).According to Uggen(2012),whether output promotes the acquisition of certain linguistic forms depends to a significant extent on the degree of salience of the linguistic form.Thus,the acquisition of academic FS through different output task types could be assumed different from the acquisition of some more salient forms,for the same output task.And how output task types affect the acquisition of academic FS is worth further study,the findings of which could provide more implications to teaching and learning of EAP in universities and colleges in China.Based on Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis and Swain's Output Hypothesis,this study aims to investigate whether different output task types have different effects on noticing and incidental acquisition of academic FS and what these effects are.In accord with the classification of output tasks by Ellis and Shintani(2014),in this study there are two focused output tasks(the retelling task and the reconstruction task),a non-focused output task(the writing task),and a non-output task(the comprehension task).The two main research questions addressed in this study are as follows:1.Do different output task types affect EFL learners' noticing of academic English FS?2.Do different output task types affect EFL learners' incidental acquisition of academic English FS?129 sophomores from the medical school in a public “Project 211” university in Jiangsu Province participated in this study.They were divided into four groups and each of the participants was randomly assigned to one of the four groups,in which the number of the participants was approximately the same to perform a corresponding task.10 target academic FS which the participants were unfamiliar with were selected by a pretest.A delayed posttest was administrated two weeks after an immediate posttest.And nine out of the 129 participants,two from Group 1,two from Group 2,two from Group 3,and three from Group 4 respectively,took part in an interview.Data from the 9 participants were not used for quantitative analysis.This study adopted a 4*1 factorial design in which the task type was set as a between-subjects factor.The dependent variables are scores of the underlining during the participants' second reading the input text and the scores of the ten target items from an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest.A one-way ANOVA was employed and the interview texts were analyzed.The major findings are summarized as follows:Firstly,focused output tasks can promote more noticing of the target academic FS than non-focused output tasks.In addition,a focused output task with a higher degree of focus on the target academic FS outperforms a focused output task with a lower degree of focus.Secondly,focused output tasks can facilitate better incidental acquisition of the target academic FS than non-focused output tasks.Besides,an output task with a higher degree of focus on the target academic FS can lead to better incidental acquisition of the linguistic form.Furthermore,focused output tasks may produce longer recall of the target academic FS than non-focused output tasks.The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for both EFL teaching and learning at college level in China.For college EFL teachers,in order to facilitate the acquisition of an academic linguistic form with a lower degree of salience,they should adopt more focused tasks to make it more salient to learners.For college EFL learners,when they learn some new academic linguistic forms,they are advised to put more attention on them intentionally.